Baseball Insider Archive: White Sox

Two news items that had nothing to do with league championship series raised my eyebrows, the first was the hiring of White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen to be a Fox studio analyst. The second was the news that former MLBPA head Donald Fehr is being given an $11 million severance package.

Usually, White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen gets credit for adjusting game plans and personnel on the fly. He's good at it, he creates matchup problems, and he probably deserves even more credit than he gets, given that his profanity and general lack of commitment to traditional protocol gets him in plenty of trouble with the media and a handful of fans. But maybe we should give him more credit for a different kind of flexibility, based on this shot, taken before a game in Seattle.

The good news is that the Orioles have only been swept once in their last eight series. The bad news is they haven't won any of those series either. Baltimore will look to get its first series win since the all-star break on the road against the White Sox -- one of four American League teams the Orioles don't have a losing record against.

Long a host of a major league spring training site, Pima County will be abandoned of spring baseball come February 2011. The home district of Tuscon, Arizona's state capital and second largest city, has hosted both the Diamondbacks and Rockies in recent years. The White Sox had been in Tuscon even longer than baseball's most recent additions, yet they will be gone starting next spring. And after 2010, Pima County will host no one, with the Rockies and Diamondbacks relocating to newer training facilities outside the area. So who's going to fill the void? If the area's Sports and Tourism Authority has anything to say about it, some teams from Japan will.

On Monday, the White Sox picked up Alex Rios, a two-time All-Star with the youth to overcome a couple sub par seasons and still grow into the player the Blue Jays thought he would become when they gave him a $70 million contract. But is it really a smart deal for Chicago's future to assume so much salary on another outfielder?